MIND

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Schizophrenia is a mental illness characterized by thought disorder, perceptual disorders and abnormal social and personal behavior, in general terms. The name of this illness was coined by the Swiss Psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler one hundred years ago. Before him this mental malady was called Dementia Praecox by the

Emil Kraepelin

German Psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. Both these terms gave some hints to the inner nature of the ailment. Kraepelin thought that the person afflicted with the illness become demented prematurely and hence the name dementia praecox. Blueler's naming hints to the real cause of the illness. He thought that the mind is split in a person suffering from the disease.
Dr. Mohan Isac a psychiatrist and researcher from Fremantle Hospital, the University of Western Australia participating in a Continuing Medical Education program of the Kerala Branch of the Indian Psychiatric Society, presented his thinking about the changes in concepts and nomenclature of the enigmatic mental illness of schizophrenia. He suggested it is high time to change the name of schizophrenia and proposed "Kraepelin-Bleuler disorder" as a passing remark.
I am also of opinion that it is high time to change the name of schizophrenia. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition - DSM-5

Eugene Bleuler

schizophrenia is included in the chapter on Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders. There are two concepts in this terminology. The first concept is that the schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder. The second idea is that schizophrenia is not a single illness, it is the name of a spectrum of illnesses. Both are agreeable concepts. The DSM-5 gives the key features of psychotic disorders. They are delusions, hallucinations, disorganised thinking and speech, disorganised behaviours and negative symptoms such as diminished emotional expressions, inactivity and keeping aloof.
The functional neuro-imaging studies of the brain conducted in schizophrenic patients show poor mentational ability and abnormal activity in Pre-Frontal Cortex of the brain. Evidently the psychotic disorders including schizophrenia are disorders of mentation and psychoses can be renamed as Mentational Disorders.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

My Self is present only when I am
awake. When I was asleep I missed the happenings around me; I was not aware of
my surroundings. I was unconscious. When I woke up I regained consciousness.

Consciousness is not merely
wakefulness. When I wake up from sleep I
do not look around vacantly, taking in the sights and the sounds around me as
if my wake mind belonged to no one. I am the proprietor of my mind. I am aware
of each and every happenings and things around me. The myriad of contents
displayed in my mind are connected with me through invisible
strings and I feel or experience these
connections with me. In other words my
consciousness is endowed with subjectivity. ‘I’ move forward and look back with
this innumerable things displayed and connected with me. This forward-moving
merriment in me is my Self.

Search for Self

Search for self had been going on
from time immemorial. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is a treatise onSelf and the great saint who composed it
found that Self is the infinite universe. (Aham Brahmāsmi)

Aristotle

Buddhist tradition holds
that the root cause of suffering is the Ordinary Man’s erroneous view of Self
as an unchanging essence. Furthermore, the tradition holds that this
error is inevitable in the natural course of life because it is based on inborn
patterns, pre-theoretic and unreasoned.

Aristotle,
followingPlato, defined thesoulas the coreessenceof a living being, but argued against its having a
separate existence.Aristotlealso believed that there were four sections of the soul:
the calculative and scientific parts on the rational side used for making
decisions, and the desiderative and vegetative parts on the irrational side
responsible for identifying our needs.

Avicenna said that the idea of the self is not logicallydependent on any physicalthing,
and that the soul should not be seen inrelative
terms, but as a primary substance. This

Avicenna

argument was later refined and simplified byRené Descartesinepistemicterms when he stated: "I can abstract from the
supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own
consciousness."

An eighteenth century philosopher David
Humethought that Self is a bundle of perceptions. “For my
part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other

of heat or cold, light or she,
love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself as any time
without a perception, and never can perceive anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time,
as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible to myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were
all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor
see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body.” David Hume: A
Treaties on Human Nature.

All these were brilliant imaginative speculations by
the fertile brains of the past. The first psychological enquiry of Self came
from William James, an American psychologist who initiated scientific
psychological enquiries. He admired Hume’s dazzling speculation on Self, but
criticised. “But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspective work,
proceeds to pour out the child in the bath, and fly to as great an extreme as
the substantialist philosophers. As they say Self is nothing but Unity, unity
abstract and absolute, so Hume says it is nothing but Diversity, diversity
abstract and absolute; whereas in truth it is that mixture of unity and
diversity which we ourselves have already found so easy to pick apart… he
denies this thread of resemblance, this core of sameness running through the
ingredients of the Self, to exist even as a phenomenal thing.”

Let us leave the brilliant speculations on Self and consciousness
in the past. The conscious mind and its proprietor the Self are constructs of
the brain. In a series of pioneering studies conducted in North America
and Italy during the middle of the twentieth century established with certainty
that the brain stem is the

The Self is a process and not a thing, and this
process is present all times when we are conscious. We can consider the Self
from two vantage points. One is the vantage point of an observer appreciating a
dynamic object. This dynamic
object is constituted by certain working of minds, certain traits of behaviour,
and a certain history of life.

The other vantage point is that of the self as knower.
This is a process that gives a focus to our experiences and eventually lets us
reflect on those experiences. Combining the two vantage points produces a dual
concept to Self. In everyday life each concept corresponds to a level of operation
of conscious mind, the Self-as-object being simpler in scope than the
Self-as-knower. There is no dichotomy between the two. The simpler Self-as-object
evolved earlier in the course of evolution and the later evolved Self-as-knower
is piled up on the top of the Self-as-object.

The Self as the witness of the mind

Countless creatures for millions of years have had
active minds happening in their brains. But only after those
brains developed a self as the protagonist capable of bearing witness did
consciousness begin, in the strict sense, and only after those brains developed
language did it become widely known that minds did exist. The Self, as the
witness, is the protagonist is something extra that reveals the presence of implicit
brain events that we call mental. Understanding how the brain produces
that something extra, the protagonist we carry around and call self, or me, or I,
is an important goal of the neurobiology of consciousness.

Monday, May 21, 2012

A person may be consciously biased towards or against an
ideology, a political party, a religion, a creed, a caste, a country, an ethnic
group etc. But a cognitive bias is different from such conscious partisanship.
Cognitive bias is an unconscious psychological process which guides the
individual in decision making without the individual’s conscious awareness. It
is the result of perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, or illogical
interpretation of facts. A conglomeration of these is called irrationality.

Cognitive biases are the result of distortions in the human
mind that always lead to the same pattern of poor judgment, often triggered by
a particular situation. But how can one person decide the judgment of another
person poor? In order to decide the judgment to be poor there should a standard
of “good judgment”. In scientific
investigations of cognitive bias, the source of “good judgment” is that of
people outside the situation which is presumed to cause the poor judgment or a
set of independently verifiable facts.

Positive side of cognitive biases

According to the evolutionary psychology some cognitive
biases are adaptive and beneficial because they lead to more effective actions
in given contexts or enable faster decisions when faster decisions are of
greater value for survival or reproduction.

Some common cognitive biases

Anchoring

This common cognitive bias is also called focalism. It
refers to a common human tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor” on one piece
of information when making decisions. During normal decision making anchoring
occurs when individuals overly rely on a specific piece of information to
govern their thought-process. Once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward
adjusting or interpreting other information to reflect the “anchored”
information. Through this cognitive bias, the first information about a subject
can affect future decision making and analysis of new information. For example
when a person looks to buy a used car he/she may focus attention excessively on
the distance travelled by it as indicated by the odometer rather than
considering how well the engine or the transmission is maintained.

Focusing effect

Daniel Kahneman

It is also called focusing illusion. This cognitive bias
occurs when people place too much importance to an event, causing an error in
accurately predicting the utility of future outcome. In economics utility means a measure of
satisfaction. People focus on notable differences, excluding those that are
less conspicuous, when making predictions about happiness or convenience. For
example, a rise in income has only a small and transient effect on happiness
and well-being, but people consistently overestimate this effect. Nobel laureate
Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman and associates proposed that this
is as a result of a focusing illusion, with which people focusing on
conventional measured of achievement rather than on everyday routine. Kahneman
writes: “Surveys in many countries conducted over decades indicate that, on
average, reported global judgments of life satisfaction or happiness have not
changed much over the last four decades, in spite of large increase in real
income per capita. While reported life satisfaction and household income are
positively correlated in a cross-section of people at a given time, increase in
income has found to have mainly transitory effect on individuals’ reported life
satisfaction.” (Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? By Daniel Kahneman
et. al. CEPS Working Paper No. 125 May 2006)

Confirmation Bias

The confirmation bias refers to the tendency to selectively
search for and consider information that confirms one's beliefs.

Examples: A student who is going
to write a research paper may primarily search for information that would
confirm his or her beliefs. The student may fail to search for or fully
consider information that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs.

A reporter who is writing an article on an
important issue may only interview experts that support her or his views on the
issue.

An employer who believes that a job applicant is
highly intelligent may pay attention to only information that is consistent
with the belief that the job applicant is highly intelligent.

Curse of knowledge

Robin Hogarth

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias according to
which better-informed individuals may have the disadvantage that they lose some
ability to understand properly the lesser-informed individuals. As such added
information may convey some disutility. The term “curse of knowledge” was
coined by the film and TV music composer Robin Hogarth. In one experiment, one
group of participants "tapped" a well-known song on a table while
another group listened and tried to identify the song. Some "tappers"
described a rich sensory experience in their heads as they tapped out the
melody. Tappers on average estimated that 50% of listeners would identify the
specific tune; in reality only 2.5% were able to. This means that the better
informed individuals failed to understand properly the lesser informed
individuals. It has been argued that the
curse of knowledge could contribute to the difficulty of teaching.

Conservatism

It is a cognitive bias. In 1973 British psychologist Glenn
Wilson published an influential book providing evidence that a general factor underlying
conservative beliefs is “fear of uncertainty.” An analysis of research papers
in 2003 established that not only fear of uncertainty but many other
psychological factors like intolerance of ambiguity and need for “cognitive closure”
contribute to the degree of one’s political conservatism. The term cognitive
closure has been defined as “a desire for definite knowledge on some issue and
eschewal of confusion and ambiguity.” (European Review of Social Psychology No.
18 pps. 133-173)

Availability bias

Availability biasis a cognitive bias that causes many to
overestimate probabilities of events associated with memorable or dramatic
occurrences. More than a bias, it is a “cognitive illusion.” Since, memorable
events are further magnified by coverage in the media; the bias is compounded
on the society level. Two well-known examples would be estimations of the
probability of plane accidents and the kidnap of children. Both events are
quite rare, but the huge majority of the population outrageously overestimates
their probability, and behaves accordingly. In reality, one is more likely to
die from an automobile accident than from a plane accident, and a child has a
higher risk of dying in an accident than the risk of getting kidnapped.Availability biasis at the root of many other human biases.